Generative AI in the Writing Classroom
Download MP3Tonight r is joined by Dr. Shannon Kane, assistant cl clinical professor in the Department of Teaching Learning Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland.
She brings expertise into literacy, education, teacher preparation, and technology integration, and a passion for helping educators navigate new tools with confidence and clarity.
Dr. King career began in international development where she supported initiatives focused on women's empowerment and access to education.
She later joined the inaugural DC Teaching Fellows cohort and taught in both traditional public and public charter schools in Washington DC where I lived.
Over the course of her year.
She, excuse me.
Over the course of her career, she has served as an instructional coach, curriculum developer professional development consultant, school leader, teacher researcher, and adjunct faculty member.
She holds a doctorate in reading, writing, and literacy from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as master's degrees in international development and in literacy elementary education slash tesol.
Her scholarship examines multiple dimensions of literacy and teacher development, including K to 12 literacy instruction.
With an emphasis on critical literacy, the preparation and mentoring of teachers identity and literacy learning, and the integration of technology into literacy pedagogy.
So if that didn't impress you, I know tonight will impress you.
So we're so excited for her to guide you through today's conversation on opportunities and challenges of using AI in the writing classroom.
So with that, I will turn it over to you and welcome Dr. King.
We're so excited to have you.
Thank you, Carly.
I'm so excited to be here.
I am really glad to see everyone and really excited to just talk, as you said about AI and what it can do and how we can really best support our students.
And ourselves as professionals.
So let's just dive right in and see how the evening goes.
So here's our goal for the night.
You know, it's always good to have a goal.
We'll see as we work through the content, how close we get to completing it all.
So we're gonna kick off with just a general welcome and wonder as we start to.
Think about the use of ai.
We're gonna do a quick blurb around Gen AI and large language models.
Briefly think about it for teachers as a tool of support.
But then we also wanna think about really as this idea of like co-writers for students and really that joy and fun that it can bring, which may sound a little bit weird.
Then also really.
Spend a little bit of time around this idea of AI responsibly and how we can use it and model that responsive responsible use.
Then hopefully we'll have some time to play around with it to model a couple of things that it can be used.
Obviously we could be here for hours doing that and then wrap up and reflection.
So that is the plan.
All right, so let's jump right in.
All right.
So here's just, again, quick goals that align with what we're gonna do in terms of introducing some really real basics around ai.
Explore how we can use it as teachers to differentiate and enhance writing instruction.
And then really think of hopefully some practical fun strategies through modeling for our students and then our objectives.
And you keep seeing the word joy in places and I really wanna sort of emphasize that.
Which again, may sound strange but I really think it.
Should be about joy, right?
Teaching and learning should be a joyful, fun, messy experience.
And so, I wanna continue to underscore and emphasize that throughout our time tonight.
So here's our welcome and wonder.
So, how does technology spark joy, creativity.
Or curiosity in your life.
And I think you guys can pop stuff into the chat, I hope.
It could be all three, it could be one of those things.
But you know how, how do you use technology to have some joy in your life or creativity or curiosity or maybe all three for a super bonus.
You know, to be completely transparent as I was thinking about this and was like, how do I use technology for.
For joy or creativity.
Right.
It's mostly for me is listening to different types of music, right.
And curating playlists and thinking about thing, like being exposed to artists and stuff that I definitely would not probably find.
And I've been really sort of dabbling with their, like ai dj, which I've been really appreciating, like, pushing my listening interests to other areas.
So yeah.
Again, any ideas or any, just keep that question sort of in the back of your mind.
And again.
Again, may sound weird, this juxtaposition of creativity and joy with technology, because to be honest, I think that's something that we often hear as an argument, I would say, or a criticism of AI, is that it's gonna kill creativity.
And but I really want us to think about how in fact it can support it.
Right.
'Cause I'm, because I believe that.
When we have joy and we have this possibility within technology, we can actually explore its possibilities and not see, it's just limitations, right?
if we, and that's our goal for tonight, right?
As you said, right?
Technology keeping us on our toes.
So gen and large language models so gen ai, so generative ai it creates new content.
So generative, artificial intelligence, right?
And that new content can be images, text code, right?
All based on the prompts we as humans enter, which is I think is really important and something we're gonna continue to come back to.
And so it.
It's this super powered assistant, right?
That never runs out of energy or imagination.
It's not a person.
It doesn't understand things like humans, but again, it has the ability to create all of this new content based on what we tell it to enter.
And then when we think of these large language models or LLMs, right?
This is.
Specific like type of gen ai.
And they are trained on billions of words to learn language patterns and they predict the words that are gonna come next.
Right?
And they.
The how sentences are structured, how ideas are created, all of that is based on the LLM studying language.
Right?
So if you entered the prompt, help me describe a thunderstorm, whether it's in Che, GBT, Gemini, any of the LLMs that are out there.
Right.
The model is going to predict and produce.
A thunderstorm description based on all of everything that it's read and mindd around thunderstorms, and it's going to everything.
It's seen before, previous prompts, and it's gonna produce something, right?
But again, the key here is that they don't think like people do, right?
They lack feelings.
They lack understanding.
So the predicting is based on if it sounds right and not if it's true.
Although they're getting better and we'll talk about the truth part, not if it's and meaning, right?
So they will hallucinate or make things up and they've gotten better, but that's still something that happens.
And they're doing that again, not to like get you caught right, or to trick you.
But because it's all based on predictions, sometimes those predictions are inaccurate, right?
So, and again, if we continue I love this analogy around the idea of large language models.
Think of like smoothies and muppets, right?
So if we think about it, imagine pouring every book, every article written into a blender and pressing the puree button, right?
That's what's the large language models are producing, right?
It doesn't remember individual books.
It doesn't remember individual.
Articles, it just knows what that smoothie of language tastes like, right.
It just, it's again, predicting and it learns from continued iterations and stuff.
Right.
And so they're confident and they sound confident, but they actually don't know what they're saying.
Right.
And so in some ways we can think of it as a Muppet, right?
Muppets, they, you know, if you close your eyes and think of your favorite Muppet, they speak with charm and rhythm and emotion.
There's not really a mind behind the curtain.
It's the human that has the thinking mind.
Right?
It's the puppeteer.
Right?
And so the Muppet can only perform with a human there.
It has no real understanding.
And as you know, someone from the University of Maryland, you know, Jim hen Jim Henson and Kermit shout out, right?
I feel like this really sort of, this Muppet analogy really speaks to me, right?
And I think this is super important because.
These ideas of what a large language model can do, what Gen AI can do, and what it can't do is it matters, right?
It's not magic, right?
They're super impressive, but they're tools.
They're not the right tools for every job, and they do make mistakes, right?
When we, you know, obviously when we think of, you know, gen ai, you know, there's the, it's cheating, right?
That's a another conversation we often hear, especially in the education space, but it's not automatically cheating, right?
Like a dictionary, like spell check.
It can be used as a support, as a tool, and it's all about the use.
So the tool itself isn't problematic, it's the implementation of the tool, right?
And so ideally we want our tools to support our work, and in no way can it really replace it because it, there is no mind behind the curtain, right?
Sort of like our Muppets.
So.
I want us to think again about this idea of how gen AI plus writing equals this science and joy and impact.
You know, I'm bringing that joy back.
So when we think of science, right, so it is a tool that does align with the science of writing instruction.
And so when we think of research based on writing instruction, there's decades of it, right?
From, you know, Steve Graham and a ton of other researchers that show.
Explicit writing strategy instruction is super important.
So if we want our students to develop as writers, we have to be explicit and we have to model it, right?
We also give authentic opportunities for write writing.
It should be joyful.
There should be choice.
We wanna give feedback, but that feedback should open up space as opposed to be prescriptive and shut down ideas, right?
We wanna lean into mentor texts, right?
If we see really strong examples of writing, having our students copy that right?
Imitate it, if you will, as they develop their own understanding of those specific strategies or approaches to writing is a great way for students to learn, right?
This idea of revisioning improving writing outcomes, the process-based approach, all of this research, right?
Gen AI can support it because it actually helps teachers.
Model, scaffold, differentiate.
It can help students practice the idea of revision, analyzing for different things like tone and experiment with voice, right?
So there's strong alignment with some of the instructional best practices, right?
This idea of joy comes from this idea of, you know, curiosity and play, right?
Our students love to experiment.
They love that instant feedback.
And I'm sure as educators if we could copy ourselves and sit next to every one of our writers or students and sort of engage in those conversations and give feedback, we would, but we know that's not realistic, right?
So using a tool like Gen ai allows our students to help see their writing and their ideas be transformed, which.
Gives them confidence, right?
And they can find joy a task that was really hard, something they may not have understood all of a sudden by using this tool.
They have greater understanding, they feel successful.
They want to continue with it, right?
It's a type of scaffold, if you will.
And then there's this risk taking, right?
And it can be playful.
So as we're learning again about the tools and strategies of writers, you can have this curiosity and fun with it, right?
Ideas.
Something as silly as like, what if I rewrite this to sound like a pirate?
Right?
Again, it's that like, learning should be fun.
It's, it can be messy and sometimes I think we lose sight of that with all of the pressures of standards and teachings, but here's a space that's created by using this tool that allows us to actually have fun.
And so when we combine these things, right.
Research best practice with this idea of fun and joy, and this isn't this like drudgery and this horrible, boring task.
All of a sudden our students are motivated and we see this lasting writing growth.
I. So thinking about teachers and the integration of Gen ai, there's so much that can be done, right?
Purposeful integration.
So if we just look at some of the ideas, and these are just like, I feel like the tip of the iceberg for the use of teachers with purposeful integration, right?
And as the question on the right says like, where could any of these allow you to save?
Prep time and ideally, that saving of time creates space for deeper modeling, for more intentional feedback, for differentiation, et cetera.
So from lesson planning and scaffolding, right?
This idea of creating mentor texts and multiple styles, adapting prompts to reading levels, generating rubrics and checklists, right?
All things that you can actually do.
With AI to really target your specific students.
This idea of craft and revision, so using AI to demonstrate and expand sentences, vary tone, experiment with structure, all things that would take a lot of time are incredibly necessary for our students around explicit instruction.
But again, saving time to focus on the sort of deeper work.
This idea of feedback, right?
We want it to be authentic, you know, your students, but sometimes if you have multiple samples, you can like, sort of look for trends.
I find the idea sort of of.
Feedback banks when we're thinking of like report cards and then personalizing it, and so it's really, again, creating space for how do you take sort of these banks of comments and feedback and then personalize it for each student as opposed to.
Individually going through it.
'cause we all know, we've all sat there and done it by like student 18.
They're either getting a really surface level comment or maybe you're looking back to see what you said to someone else.
And so here's a way to sort of already have that bank produced for you and then personalize it.
And so it's time efficient and really allows you to get the heart of the work.
And then scaffolding and differentiation.
We could do a whole other presentation on this for all students, but really thinking of our multilingual learners.
Right.
And instead of just hitting that surface level or sort of doing the same thing over and over, because we know it's tried and true and we don't have a lot of time to be creative.
Right.
Again, going back to that joy, just like we want there to be joy and excitement for our students, there should be some joy and excitement for us, right?
As educators planning this, planning these lessons.
Right?
And so if you have that tried and true lesson that you're like, I've taught it.
It's good.
The kids like it, but I kind of wanna shake it up a little bit.
Right?
And maybe you just don't have the time.
Again, AI can be a tool that can give you some suggestions to create some time, right?
So we really wanna think about it as extending capacity.
It doesn't replace your professional judgment.
It's not, you know, in charge.
You are still the pilot.
You are just using it sort of as your co-pilot.
As your partner, right?
Think of that sort of co-planner that person that, you know, you can always go to that generative brainstormer.
Well, it, gen AI is that person, but they're there all the time, right?
They're able to give you that feedback, brainstorm and, you know, save you some time.
So that's thinking about the use of AI from a teacher's perspective.
But I really want us to spend a little bit more time and really look at this idea of it from a student's perspective.
Like how can we use it with our students and.
Get them thinking about it as a tool, not necessarily just as a shortcut.
So again, hitting that joy factor, right?
And so what should ai, that's what we really wanna hone in on, but first, that's like what it shouldn't be used for, right?
It's that we've not using it to copy whole text without revision or thought, and we're gonna talk more about why we shouldn't do that.
And you know, using it to avoid creative effort, right?
So.
In fact that when used intentionally and if used in some of the ways we're gonna talk about it actually adds creativity and sparks creativity as opposed to sort of, shutting it down.
So ways that it can be right.
Students can brainstorm ideas, they can test structure, they can play with voice and vocabulary, right?
So we go through these lessons like.
Experimenting with voice and changing tone, and then our students often just sit there 'cause they don't know what to do, right?
It's that paralysis by analysis, right?
They either wanna copy and mimic exactly what you did, or they're kind of lost, or maybe they're a little bit confused, but here.
Here's an opportunity to integrate the use of AI with our students, and all of a sudden I can sort of play around and take some risks, right?
This idea of this iteration of writing, right, it's choice and reflection.
It's not replacement, right?
Because anyone who's used AI before realizes that even with the best prompt, sometimes you stare at the screen and you're like, Nope, I actually like what I said better.
Or that does, Nope, that just doesn't sound right.
Or it, it sparks an idea in your head and then you go back and rewrite on your own, right?
It's not just pure replacement.
And so if anything, it's underscoring and emphasizing that idea that writing is this creative iterative process, right?
But you have to be sort of present to use it as opposed to that copy and just keep it moving.
And then this competence, right?
Because this instant feedback, these instant ideas, this curiosity.
It sort of fosters the sense of flow and success, right?
And so students kind of see like, oh, from this idea, oh, I can see that, or I like this, or Oh, I'm gonna take this and go in a different direction, right?
And so it sort of snowballs and creates this creative motivation, right, for our students.
And so we.
Wanna encourage this exploration.
It's a tool just like a hammer, just like a calculator.
But we don't use hammers and calculators for all the jobs, right?
We have to think does the hammer work best here or does something else work best here?
Do I really need a calculator or not?
So we need to create space to have these clear expectations for authenticity, right?
If we don't want our students to use AI for the things on the right, we actually have to be intentional and talk about them.
If we sort of just put blinders on and like, you know, say, Nope, we're not gonna use it.
Students are still probably gonna use it, they're probably gonna use it incorrectly.
And again, all of the benefits that we can possibly see from it are being lost.
And also all the instruction that you're spending your time on also is probably being lost.
'cause they're probably just gonna copy the whole test without revision or thought, and then cross their fingers and hope it doesn't get flagged.
So this idea of helping students right.
So the first idea of is, and all of this is obviously developmentally appropriate, we wanna really think about this, but like this having a policy or a classroom AI agreement, right?
And being really clear, and this is something that, you know, myself and my colleagues at Maryland are still sort of wrestling with around, you know, individual courses.
Like what is the AI policy?
And, you know, AI is something that is rapidly advancing and continues to shift it seems almost on a day-to-day basis.
And so even from semester to semester, we see, you know, us talking and revising our AI policy.
And so this is something that, you know, whether you're in higher ed or whether you're in K 12, thinking about like what is the policy in your classroom like how, and obviously with younger students, but I would also say with older students, secondary.
Letting parents know your policy and the why behind it as well.
Right.
These clear expectations that it's a tool, not a shortcut.
And I think having, again, developmentally appropriate conversations with your students and talking about it as a tool, I think when we model it and talk about it and take something away, that's, and no longer make something taboo.
I think some of that like shock value of like, oh, ai, you know, is sort of goes away.
And then when you're like, no, we can use it and here's how it's a great tool, but also here's why it's really problematic and share those things and be transparent with your students.
I think all of a sudden there's a little bit more like, oh, they, they kind of underst.
Why we shouldn't just copy and paste, right?
This is where that third bullet that talking about hallucinations and bias comes in, right?
Large language models have gotten so much better even in the last six months.
The amount of hallucinations has decreased.
Just sort of straight off the bat.
If you just put in a prompt the newer models, Gemini 3.0 just came out I think yesterday.
Chat, GBT is now on like 5.1.
5.0 came out like a couple months ago.
So they are naturally hallucinating and making up things less, but they still do.
So in your prompts you can actually instruct them not to hallucinate and not to make up things, and they won't because you tell them that.
But without telling them that there is still a chance that they will bias is something that they say they're working on.
But it's still there.
And this is, I think, a great thing you can model with students.
If you've never really.
Sort of played around with ai.
You can go into any large language model and ask it to summarize art, and you can name a time period, you know, 15th century, et cetera.
And often, like historically, they will produce a lovely sounding paragraph about art in the 15th century.
It all happens to be.
France and Italy.
So if reading that, you would be like, oh, there was no art anywhere else.
Like not only no art anywhere else in Europe, but nowhere else in the world.
Right?
So there is this bias, right?
There's, we have colleagues at the university during research on sort of image generation and lots of things.
So I think sharing that with students, again, having that critical consumer lens about that there is still a bias.
It is a tool.
It is not perfect.
And I think once we share that with our students.
They then I think are a lot more critical of the tool.
And again, their willingness to just use it universally sort of decreases.
This idea of using student writing portfolios may sound very strange.
But here is where I think you can actually.
Have students see their sort of growth and use of it.
And so what I mean here by that is students when they, in their writing portfolios, they keep and maintain different writing samples that document their growth or their, you know, a piece they wanna keep.
But you can actually, they should keep sort of their AI pieces as well where they've played a role and so they can see their growth and impact over time.
Right.
And so in practice.
They may have their drafted version without ai you know, where AI didn't play a role, and then the version where they did use AI to help them, right?
And so when they use, let's say, gen AI to revise, right?
And so they're gonna keep the original draft.
And the AI assisted version in their portfolio, right?
And they're gonna label both pieces.
It's self-generated, AI supported or AI revised, right?
You can have your own labels, you know, because there is a difference between if you have AI to support your writing as you're going through the process.
Or AI to revise your writing.
Right.
And you know, and then they can reflect on the differences, right?
As I know that a lot of schools, when they use portfolios, the students will look at the pieces in their portfolios and maybe select a few to talk through at a parent-teacher conference or highlight.
And one of the talking points they could do is to compare, to set them side by side and sort of.
You know, which, what did AI change?
Which version feels like my voice?
What did I learn about using this?
Right?
So again, it becomes a tool in the learning process.
And we're, again, we're making this public.
It's not something seedier that you have to hide that you did, right?
It's like, no, I use this and here's why.
And it be, I helps me become a better writer.
Right?
And so, you know, teachers can assess the growth, right?
Students can also see like, oh, this piece at the early part of the year, I tend to lean AI for maybe voice and tone, but by the end of the year, look, I wasn't leaning into it as much because I sort of developed that on my own, right?
And so again, this idea.
Students get to see their thinking and their ideas transformed and helped by this tool, right?
They choose what to keep.
So now writing, again, they feel empowered, right?
It's not a replacement, it's an empowerment.
And this reflection is really where that learning and power comes from.
We really want our students to spend that time reflecting on what they chose to keep, what they didn't keep, and what they're seeing as growth over time.
And then the last thing is this idea of using this echo and amplify model that a colleague and myself at the University of Maryland had been working on, and we found
that it's really been, you know, successful and can really help our students, whether it's our college students or K 12 students, think about the use of AI critically.
So share a little bit about that, and then we're gonna jump into some examples.
So this idea of this model, right?
We call it the Echo and Amplify model.
And so this idea of echoing here, it's, we want our students to echo what they observe and what they internalize.
And in this case, about the writing moves, right?
That the, that you as the teacher models.
Right.
So in this case we're talking about writing.
And so we want our students to really observe us using AI after we've had our talk about bias and hallucinations and our ethical use, right?
But now we're gonna really sort of model how it can help our students grow as writers, and they're gonna observe.
Right.
And they're gonna see what we do.
And we're gonna be very metacognitive here.
We're gonna talk about our thought process, about our prompt.
We're gonna be really transparent about our uses here.
Right?
And we specifically really wanna underscore again, this sort of reflective use of it and the ethical.
We're not just copying and pasting.
We're not like, oh, this is better.
Copy paste.
Look, I'm done.
Now I can go do something else.
Right?
It's the, does this still fit my voice?
Is this authentic right?
Is this free of bias, you know, and really be, again, metacognitive with our students.
The amplify, amplify part of the model.
And again, when we think of amplify, something tends to become like more intense, right?
Or it's sharpened, right?
So we're amplifying it here.
We want our students to, to get the idea that they're gonna extend, they're gonna sharpen these practices, and in our case, talking about writing of using Gen AI as a tool to grow and develop as writers, right?
So they're gonna amplify these, the skills and the the practices that they've observed you do right.
As they grow and develop as writers, right?
The use of this tool.
And so, but this only works if all of the parts are happening, right?
We have to model, we have to be metacognitive, we have to have this application, and we have to have this space for reflection.
That also, again, ties back to that portfolio, are students having that critical reflection of their use of ai.
All right, so we're gonna try it out.
We're gonna like, have some fun.
So the first thing we wanna do is, let's say we want our students to sort of improve a sentence, right?
And so here, let's say we had this flat sentence, right?
Or like a pretty good sentence.
And we're gonna use the idea of like, the dog ran across the yard.
Right.
And so the goal here is to help our students see that word choice and the syntax of sentence really can shape the tone and the message that our readers are getting as they, you know, read our writing.
Right?
So we so imagine the dog ran across the yard.
We can all get that right?
We can all see this, you know, dog running across the yard.
So here's how we would do it, right?
So we're gonna actually close this up.
We're gonna pull up, i'm gonna pull up my chat.
GPT, just for fun.
All right, so hopefully guys you can see that.
So instead of the dog across the yard, right?
Our idea ran across the yard, we're gonna pick a tone or voice, right?
So.
I don't know, feeling a little fall.
We just had Halloween, so let's go with suspenseful, right?
So we're gonna ask chat, GBT to rewrite this sentence in a suspense.
Full tone, but, and it helps if you spell it, but the nice thing is it'll tell you when you spell it correctly.
But here's the thing, we only wanna keep it to one sentence, right?
Because it's the original is one sentence, and we want it to highlight, changed words in brackets, because we wanna be able to notice the difference, right?
So here's the sentence that we're gonna use.
The dog ran across the yard.
All right, let's see what it gives us.
Ooh, the dog lurched across the yard as a strange stillness settled behind it.
So now again, modeling with our students, we would have the two up on the board, right?
The dog ran across the yard, have an image in my head versus the dog lurched across the yard as a strange stillness settled behind it, right?
So here you'd have a quick conversation.
What changed?
Does it feel more suspenseful?
Does it play?
Does it seem playful?
Does it work?
Does it not work?
Right?
Maybe you're like, oh, I loved the lurched across the yard, but the strange stillness just isn't working for me.
Right?
And your students, let's say they decide that, right?
And so you could say, keep the first change, but.
Oops.
Rewrite the second part of the sentence with something besides strange stillness.
Still produce one sentence and bracket changes.
Okay.
The dog lurched across the yard as a shadow slipped into view.
Much better.
Thumbs up.
Definitely like that.
Better than strange stillness, right?
And so after you do this, you have your students can play, then they can practice, right?
They would repeat, they would do the same thing.
They can then label like what I kept, what I learned about tone.
Et cetera.
And this is something you can easily slip it right into the portfolio.
And again, here's a way for students who may, you know, sometimes struggle with that idea of you know, tone and voice, right?
Or again, they're gonna copy exactly what you did, right?
It reminds me of that old Snoopy cartoon where it's like a dark and stormy night, right?
Everyone's writing starts a dark and stormy night, but here's a way for students to sort of make it their own.
So some things to think about as, you know, we, as we do that just to keep in mind, you know, one simple tool around changing tone, but.
You can provide a tone word bank, right?
So we can differentiate even within this, right?
You could do sentence stems for emerging writers.
You could have your advanced students, you know, work on style, use parallel structure, maintain 12 to 15 words, double the length of the sentence, right?
So this one skill of improving a sentence by focusing on tone.
Right.
All of a sudden you can differentiate that further and you have a ton of other lessons, right?
Just some things to think about overriding and this idea of Purple Pros, right?
Those fluffy words that we're like, do we really need that?
That's why that idea of capping a length or one sentence outputs is important, right?
We still want this to be authentic to our students, and also you can think about sort of what developmentally works for your grade level.
This idea of voice drift, right?
Sometimes AI can unintentionally voice drift.
And so that's why that preserve the original meaning and subject is important.
And again, that's a conversation to have with students, right?
And then just this blind acceptance, right?
That's why I really think that part of students have to keep or reject their edits and justify their choice.
So if a student is going to keep that entire first example, right, that the dog lurched because of the strange stillness, great, you can keep that whole sentence, but why?
Why are you keeping it?
Why does it do?
Why is it better than your original sentence, et cetera.
So that justification or rejection is that critical thinking part, right?
The students are then sort of internalizing those skills and strategies as writers.
So let's do another one.
All right, so we're gonna change point of view, right?
So here, when we're thinking of changing point of view, right?
We have a short narrative, right?
And so.
We want to change, we wanna teach students how we can control perspective and this idea of like narrator and reliability, right?
So for this task, you typically need like a pretty short paragraph like three to five sentences, right?
And from there we will make some changes.
So we're gonna jump into that.
Jumping back to my friend, old friend chat, GPT here.
All right, so we're changing it up here, right?
So we have our paragraph, right?
So let's say we have the paragraph, I stood on the diving board, my toes squishing against the rough edge.
The pool looked way deeper.
I'm hoping you guys are constructing an image in your mind.
Then, oops.
Well that'll then it did before everyone was watching, but I pretended.
Which we know is not to notice, right?
So I have an image in my head of this little tiny person, way up high, right?
I took a big breath and jumped.
I was flying.
Oops.
And then I hit the water with a splash.
And came up laughing.
So here's our sort of paragraph, right?
That we're gonna work with.
And so, so we want it to do so it's written by a student.
You can have it by a student, you can have it be yours, right?
And so now what I want the, so I have this paragraph, I could copy and paste it.
I'm gonna tell, I wanna say rewrite this paragraph, right?
And since we're working on different perspectives.
Right.
We want to, from, let's say I'm gonna say, let's rewrite this paragraph from the pool's view, right?
I want it to keep factual events, right?
And do not add new characters.
Let's see what it, let's see what it gives us.
From where I rested below, I watched the kids step onto the diving board.
Their toes pressed its rough edge.
I knew I was the same depth as always, but they seemed to see me as much deeper.
People gathered around their attention fixed On the moment though the kid tried to ignore 'em.
They pulled in a big breath and lts, soaring for a second before crashing into me with a bright splash rising back up, laughing.
You know, that's kind of lame in my opinion.
You know, I it's almost like a rewrite of the other ones, so I'm not a fan of that.
Right.
And we would talk about that.
Maybe some kids would like it.
I could tell it being like, I could say honestly, not a fan of the rewrite.
Try again.
Same rules rewrite.
Let's see what it does.
Okay.
Everyone crowd around.
I picked them unfazed.
They pulled a, I would say the second one is better.
And now what we could even do is we could compare the original to second to the third.
That prompt my prompt about, honestly, not of the fan.
I would say that's not a, the greatest prompt in the conversation I would have with students, like the criticisms that your students maybe gave towards it, I would share in that prompt, like you basically just restated what this was, this, right?
And sort of give it and then see what it comes back with, right?
You could have it right from a second person, a third person, non-human, et cetera.
All of these are possible, and again.
Just like in the first one.
The big is if you're gonna keep it great, why?
And if you're gonna toss it out, why?
Right.
Just like with the first one we wanna really think about sort of the, what's missing, what's not missing, that sort of perspective, right?
And so.
Some common pitfalls.
'Cause you know, our students, they're learning, let's be honest, we have the same pitfalls as well.
Is that our students sometimes we'll head hop, right?
Meaning that we would do the diving board character, someone else.
And so that's why we talk about limiting access.
So we don't wanna add events, we wanna keep the timeline the same.
But you know what?
You could change it.
And that goes back to the differentiation, right?
You could have point of view cards, the list that they can know and not know, reminding students the different point of views and offer sentence frames.
So these are all things that you can do with your students.
We're not gonna do the last one just for the sake of time, 'cause I wanna create a little bit of space.
But just this idea of leads.
Right.
And so here you would want your students to really, this to me is this ultimate revising tool around multiple openings and selecting one that fits the best for their like purpose and audience, right?
And so.
You could clarify.
You go into AI and you say, explain composting for fifth graders.
Right?
And so it produces something, or maybe you give it something and then it's, you know, you would say, create three leads for this article, for fifth grades.
One starting with a fact, one a scenario, and one a question, right?
And then it's gonna produce them, and then your students will evaluate maybe they vote, which one they like.
You could have a rubric that your student, that maybe you use to evaluate leads of your students' writing, and then have your students use that rubric with what's produced by ai, right?
Like does it hook your interest?
Does it fit your purpose?
Does it set up the main idea?
Right?
And have your students sort of critically.
You know, look at what's produced.
And then again whatever they wanna keep, they keep, but they justify whatever they wanna get rid of.
We also want 'em to justify, because the, what we don't keep is also as important as what we keep, here we can d differentiate, right?
We can provide definitions, statistics, anecdote, questions, like all of those are like sort of a lead menu, right?
For our multilingual learners.
Vocabulary banks model sentence starters.
Honestly, vocabulary banks and model sentence starters are great for all students, but really helpful for our multilingual learners.
And just in thinking of some common pitfalls, so generic hooks, right?
So.
We wanna make sure we're giving 'em some ideas mismatching with the audience.
So that's why we're gonna give a constraint like fifth grade or whatnot, and then fact errors.
And so only include facts common to elementary science standards or if unsure, speak generically.
The other thing I wanna emphasize and notice this isn't necessarily to teach hooks.
You know, your students already may have learned that and now we're learning how to produce it and write it ourselves, right?
And so again, just like if you.
Were there brainstorming with the student.
They have this opportunity to brainstorm with ai.
So here's just some helpful prompt banks similar to what we talked through, like rewrite the sentence, the bracket sort of is what you could put into.
And then again, the pace is your sentence for point of view, rewrite.
Another helpful bank and then the INF informational leads, again, just some banks, some easy sort of take it and then make it work for yourself.
Just something to think about.
And so I really just wanted to, again, just spend some, spend a second, we don't have to do a share out or anything, but just thinking about ways that you can sort of encourage.
AI writing instruction for your students, maybe for yourself.
I think that this is definitely, probably one of the most common ways that as adults and professionals use it.
It's that rewrite of an email of whatnot.
But I think again, just like we model being writers with our students, right, sharing.
Those sort of anecdotes with our students around what we use it for and how we use it is super powerful, right?
Our students are going to watch us and take our lead from it.
And so just like we wanna create critical thinkers about texts we want create critical thinkers around technology.
And so this is just one sort of way to do it, and that's all.
So if there's any questions, but I really thank folks for taking the time tonight.
Awesome.
Thanks so much, Shannon.
This was amazing just as I expected it to be.
Thanks so much for.
Giving us your time tonight.
I know folks were engaging in the chat and asking questions behind the scenes, so we really appreciate it.
And be on the lookout.
Dr. Kane is also writing a blog through, through rif, so that will be posted early next week as well as the recording to this on all of our channels.
So be on the lookout for that.
And if you registered for this, you'll also receive a follow-up email with a copy of a certificate and a copy of a handout.
Any handouts that Shannon referred to.
So thank you so much for your time and Dr. Kane, thanks for everything.
We really appreciate it and I'm sure we'll chat soon and thanks for bearing with my technology challenges, everyone.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Have a great night.
Bye-bye.
